2014 fall English 8121

Philosophy, my first five years

By any standards I can think of, I’ve so far had a very lucky academic career. I started as an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville [1], back in 1995, where they treated me very well for nine years, nurturing me through tenure as well as promotions to associate and full professor — the classical (if increasingly less common) academic sequence. Then, in 2004, I was hired by Stony Brook University’s Department of Ecology & Evolution [2], one of the most prestigious in the field. I still remember the thrill of my first day there, walking around the 6th floor of the Biology building and passing the offices of a number of people who had written the textbooks on which I had studied when I was younger: Doug Futuyma, James Rohlf, Robert Sokal, George Williams [3,4,5]. And now they were my colleagues!